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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Paperback)

September 2008 Indie Next List

“Literary deejay Diaz spins magical realism, anime, Tolkien, and minority-literature-as-ethnography into a remix of the immigrant's tale from the hands of a master. This is the smartest, funniest, and sharpest novel of the year and confirms his virtuosic ability to communicate Dominican-American experience with vibrancy and honesty.”
— LaTissia Mitchell, Shaman Drum Bookshop, Ann Arbor, MI

Description

Oscar is a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd who--from the New Jersey home he shares with his old world mother and rebellious sister--dreams of becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien and, most of all, finding love. But Oscar may never get what he wants. Blame the fukU--a curse that has haunted Oscar's family for generations, following them on their epic journey from Santo Domingo to the USA. Encapsulating Dominican-American history, "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" opens our eyes to an astonishing vision of the contemporary American experience and explores the endless human capacity to persevere--and risk it all--in the name of love. Listen to Junot DIaz's interview on iTunes "Meet the Author" here.Download iTunes here.

About the Author

Junot Diaz was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey. He is the author of the critically acclaimed "Drown"; "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao", which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and "This Is How You Lose Her", a "New York Times" bestseller and National Book Award finalist. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Genius Fellowship, PEN/Malamud Award, Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, and O. Henry Award. A graduate of Rutgers College, he is currently the fiction editor at "Boston Review" and "The""Rudge" and works as the Nancy Allen professor of writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Praise For…

“Funny, street-smart and keenly observed…An extraordinarily vibrant book that’s fueled by adrenaline-powered prose.”—Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

“Díaz finds a miraculous balance. He cuts his barnburning comic-book plots (escape, ruin, redemption) with honest, messy realism, and his narrator speaks in a dazzling hash of Spanish, English, slang, literary flourishes, and pure virginal dorkiness.”—Sam Anderson, New York Magazine

“Genius...a story of the American experience that is giddily glorious and hauntingly horrific...That Díaz’s novel is also full of ideas, that [the narrator’s] brilliant talking rivals the monologues of Roth’s Zuckerman—in short, that what he has produced is a kick-ass (and truly, that is the just word for it) work of modern fiction—all make The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao something exceedingly rare: a book in which a new America can recognize itself, but so can everyone else.”—Oscar Villalon, San Francisco Chronicle

“Astoundingly great.”—Lev Grossman, Time

“Terrific...High-energy...It is a joy to read, and every bit as exhilarating to reread.”—Jennifer Reese, Entertainment Weekly